Design thinking meets Lean Start Up

The most common refrain we hear from our clients is “we need our managers and leaders to take more risks and be more agile.”

When we dig deeper the behaviours organisations now see as being necessary to be responsive and adaptable to a rapidly changing marketplace include being mentally agile, psychologically flexible, with a learning oriented mindset, able to light multiple fires to see what lands, etc, etc. The three theorists / practitioners that I have followed most closely on these matters in recent years have been John Kotter (Accelerating Change), Tim Brown (Design Thinking) and Eric Ries (Lean Start Up). Separately, the work of these guys has provided much insight and value to the work we now do with our clients. But when you bring the key principles from each of these practitioners together… that’s when things start to get really interesting. You start to get what I believe will be a lasting and coherent framework or set of principles that should underpin all Organisation Development work and change programmes in our organisations. I was really excited the other day when I came across this link which shows a couple of these theorists in conversation.